Book review: Never Have I Ever, by Katie Heaney
An editor at BuzzFeed, 25-year-old Katie Heaney has never had a boyfriend.
by Katie Heaney
Grand Central Publishing
3.5 stars
Katy Wadlman
An editor at BuzzFeed, 25-year-old Katie Heaney has never had a boyfriend. Her memoir runs through the crushes and candidates, almosts and also-rans. But the heart of it lies with the women - friends from K-12, college, and grad school who are meaningful constants.
The book opens and closes with Heaney's best friend Rylee, a "lighthouse person", "magnetic and luminescent", in whose steady glow the men wheel by, ephemeral as shadow puppets. Never Have I Ever arrives at a literary moment in which people are obsessed with the likeability (or lack thereof) of female characters. Whatever it is, Heaney possesses it in spades. Her memoir, which takes as its subject liking and being liked, has all of the intimate cheerfulness that verb implies. Behold the book's first sentence, which reads: "I would like to tell you about a theory I've developed … about a certain brand of people I like to call 'lighthouses'." Our narrator is the type of person who likes things and in return she commands our sympathies, our liking.
At times, Heaney seems too upbeat to compel our empathy, too appealing to repel guys the way she says she does. On some level the book needs us to believe its heroine's singledom is not her fault. Yet the idea that Heaney would require defending is crazy-making: it contradicts the spirit of the book.
Heaney is living out what seems like the Disney World version of her premise: her life is crammed with friends, interests and colourful adventures. Her alleged social awkwardness looks from here like normal interaction. It is not hard to imagine others in her situation avoiding relationships for reasons she never mentions: physical or mental illness, a family issue, trauma, all the scary and serious winds that can blow you off the path of "normal development".
While faulting Heaney for not acknowledging these alternatives is probably going too far, anyone hoping to find a reflection of a darker lived experience in Never Have I Ever will probably just feel weird and monstrous all over again.